Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Cisco launches Application-Oriented Networking. Yesterday, Cisco finally announced AON (Application-Oriented Networking), which is basically the ability to process Web services in a Cisco router. I hope this will wake up the SOA/WS-* world to the fact that for Web services to be anywhere near as big a deal as we are all claiming, then it had better be understood as a new application-level network based the SOAP envelope. Web services is not an RPC, its not a bus (not even an ESB)--its a fully routable SOAP network with SOAP intermediaries handling both business as well as technical functions. Let me also remind everyone that AON also stands for Aspect-Oriented Networking. As I've mentioned before in my blog (see Endpoint services vs. protocol services and Aspect-oriented Networking), the SOAP header processing model enables SOAP features that are effectively aspects. Let me point out some others who are making the connection: Carlos Perez (twice),  Jason Brome, Michael Curry, and Loosely Coupled (sort of). And my favorite reference is this paper, Identical Principles, Higher Layers: Modeling Web Services as Protocol Stack, which I discussed in a previous entry. 7:55:03 AM